Meg Murry is an early (1962!) female sci-fi heroine of children’s literature: Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is a true classic. I remember reading this book as a kid and really loving it, but I didn’t remember it as science fiction. Yet it clearly is. To me, that suggests how much it succeeds. And this is science fiction with some actual science— physics and time/space travel, inpsired by Einstein— not with futuristic weapons and spaceships like so much of what we’re inundated with.
So, Meg: what makes her so compelling, keeping this book in the zeitgeist all this time? Meg is awkward, physically. She has no confidence herself, and she wishes she could fit in (like anyone who was ever a teenage girl). She’s smart but can’t always work the way she’s “supposed” to, she’s angry, she gets in fights (fiery!), she’s impatient. She’s fiercely loyal to her brother and her father. And like many other badass females, she ultimately relies on love and integrity to fight the power. She puts herself through what she knows will be difficult circumstances because she knows she is the one who can succeed. She never set out to be a hero, but she sure acts like one. Meg is counseled to rely on her “faults” when she needs them— and that she does, to great effect, rescuing her father and her brother from frightening forces of evil.
Frightening, indeed:
Hence: The Badass Female Project. I started out by asking my facebook friends to identify favorite badass females in fiction, with bonus points for female creators. They came through, my facebook friends. And I was gratified that there was so much. And so this year, I’m taking it all in. It fuels my desire to be a more awesome human— be it training in the gym, improving my krav maga technique, spending time in mediation and yoga, building my professional accomplishments, being a super and strong partner/sister/daughter, and all the other stuff I do in my life. I’m looking for badass females— strong, imperfect, interesting, and inspiring folks who identify as female. From fiction, from real life, from anywhere in between.